Baby led weaning

The day before Elliott's six month birthday I went out and bought a highchair from Ikea and was super excited to start solid food with him. I had read a book called Baby-led Weaning by Gill Rapley and had bought banana and avocado for Elliott to try for breakfast.

Elliott's first BLW experience was underwhelming... He didn't try to grab the food, and he certainly didn't demolish it like the babies I'd seen on YouTube did. After nine days of him crying after we put him in the highchair I was starting to think we may as well give up BLW and do conventional purees. I even bought a jar of organic pureed peas at the supermarket last night.

This evening I had a breakthrough though. Rather than feed Elliott the peas on a spoon I thought he might like to paint his highchair with them. He did! He loved it! There were peas EVERYWHERE and he had so much fun that when I put half a banana into the mix he picked that up and tried to nom it. Yay!

So I am back on the baby-led weaning bandwagon. Now to find more foods Elliott can paint with! (^o^)

Riverdale Farm

Now that it's summer in Toronto I am trying to take Elliott out and explore the city more. Today I meant to take a quick walk, and ended up trekking all the way to Riverdale Farm and back! Riverdale Farm is not a working farm, it's just a place where city kids can learn what a donkey looks like :-D

Elliott loved being at the farm! He especially loves looking at leaves blowing in the wind when he looks up at trees. He seemed to really enjoy meeting the goats today, too.



It's amazing to me how expressive babies become at six months old!

Farewell Japan

I left this blog in somewhat of a hurry after the earthquake on March 11th. It was unsafe to drink the water in Tokyo if you were a nursing mother and my husband was being called back to his university in Toronto, so we rushed to buy tickets home early and said goodbye to Japan about a week after the earthquake happened.

I have wondered if our time in the super-stimulating loft might have hurried Elliott's development along. There is a mum in my apartment building in Toronto who has a baby girl with the same birthday as our baby. We go to the same play group, so I am able to compare them. Elliott started sitting up unassisted and rolled from front to back at 5.5 months, but the baby girl was doing it earlier. Elliott is reasonably happy to sit up for long periods of time, but he flops to the floor when he gets tired. The baby girl is completely comfortable sitting, and has even started trying to crawl! All before six months old. From this I conclude that both our babies are doing things a bit early, but that girls do things faster than boys. (Although there's another baby girl a week older than Elliott at play group who doesn't know how to sit up by herself yet)

You can see from all this that mothers are pretty competitive!!

Here is a picture of Elliott sitting up nice and straight in a Dragonball suit we bought for him in Japan: